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What does this driver bring of new that the opensource one present now, let's say, in Ubuntu 9.10 doesn't have? I can't fully understand what is this Gallium driver, I've never used it on my system, but this interests me since I've a laptop with an ATI X600.

I've visited wikipedia, but that didn't help much, I hope you guys can explain it to a noob like me :P

Traditional fixed-function OpenGL components (such as lighting and texture combining) are implemented with shaders. OpenGL commands such as glDrawPixels are translated into textured quadrilateral rendering. Basically, any rendering operation that isn't directly supported by modern graphics hardware is translated into a hardware-friendly form.

Future state trackers will be created for OpenGL 3.0 and OpenGL-ES 2.x.

Comment

What does this driver bring of new that the opensource one present now, let's say, in Ubuntu 9.10 doesn't have? I can't fully understand what is this Gallium driver, I've never used it on my system, but this interests me since I've a laptop with an ATI X600.

I've visited wikipedia, but that didn't help much, I hope you guys can explain it to a noob like me :P

From a user point of view Gallium is pretty useless at the moment, it still needs time (1 year or more) to mature.
Long term advantages are:

better performances (the architecture is similar to modern proprietary graphic drivers)

once you implement the core driver you automatically have support for a lot of tecnologies (OpenGL, EXA, and maybe in the future video acceleration)

These are things that cannot be achieved rapidly by the current driver architecture.

Comment

Once the r300-specific driver is written (which is essentially finished now), it can plug into all the other hardware-independent modules of Galium and make use of them?

Am I understanding correctly that the remaining Mesa/OpenGL-related work is not dependent on the r300g driver, but is done once for all the drivers? So we are waiting for the same thing that all the other drivers are waiting for?